Introducing “YouTube Music Key”

Google is now reserving a bunch of urls tied to ‘YouTube Music Key,’ including youtubemusickey.com, musickey.co, musickey.co.uk, .musickey.jp. All of which suggests that this could be the name of YouTube’s upcoming, premium music service.

More mainstream urls like musickey.com are taken, which means someone could be earning a huge payout in the near future. Stay tuned…

The thumbnail tapestry is cluttered, and each frame should have text below or above (though the overlays are a nice touch) plus more air around it.

But the basic (upper) GUI is very nice and easy to look at. I hope the white space around the ‘Featured Music Videos’ stays. That’s almost Google-quality.

The logo is cool too, in fact it’s almost pretty (though I think the red will be missed when ‘Beta’ goes away — perhaps it could go to ‘Popular’ or ‘Popular Categories’ instead? Otherwise, ‘cool’ may turn into ‘cold’), and again, there’s a lot of nice, white space.

I critizised Oswald for the name, but I’m embarrassed to say that I actually got it all wrong in the first place (I read it as ‘vidiscape’, which didn’t make sense).

VIDescape, on the other hand, is absolutely brilliant. Respect!

So, Tom Oswald, if you see this: Congratulations — you made a truly promising site and you found an excellent name for it!

I don’t know if this is showing up for anyone else, but at the very top of the site, right in the middle, is a “Support Israel” ad. It’s probably not a good idea to advertise support for a controversial political entity. Why would you want to alienate your company from potential consumers?

Doesn’t look half bad. Also doesn’t look half good. That might be the most boring, uninteresting site I’ve ever been on. I get the content is the driving force but c’mon, I think I feel asleep after I clicked on that link.

One of the things I liked was the front page when you clicked a category with only 3-4 thumbnails. This resulted in a very simple page with lots of empty space.

But if you click on a category with many thumbnails it gets messy. That should be fixed (for example by allowing only 4 thumbnails).

And the thumbnail size needs to be 16:9. Plus the ‘Related Videos’ column on the player page should flush with the player (perhaps it does in other browsers/resolutions); the black vertical borders are confusing (lose them and the logo can be slightly larger), the player should be bigger, and there’s no need to repeat ‘Popular Categories’ below the comments section…

Google/YouTube will never use these urls; they’re just going to park them as redirects back to their main YouTube site when the product launches. They do this all the time with new products. They probably own close to 10,000+ domain names that they don’t use for anything but redirects.